Since moving their testing to the Sauce Labs Continuous Testing Cloud, the team at Women Who Code—a global nonprofit committed to a world where women are proportionally represented in tech—has improved their development process with the ability to test on a wide range of browser, operating system and real device combinations. With Sauce Labs, they are also able to catch bugs faster and earlier in the development process, which has increased confidence in their QA cycle.
The Challenge
Women Who Code is a global nonprofit organization dedicated to inspiring women to excel in technology careers. Their mission is to see a world where women are proportionally represented in technology. With this in mind, they are committed to building a community (now over 160,000 strong) that provides women the skills they need to achieve their goals.
The small engineering team at Women Who Code supports networks around the world with a web application that keeps members connected through physical events, job boards, and forums, along with tools that enable their volunteer leaders to distribute content and help their communities thrive.
With a myriad of requirements for this application, along with a large range of browsers, operating systems, and mobile devices that their users can access them from, the team was having a hard time keeping up. Within their continuous integration workflow, developers were running approximately 15 manual tests with every deploy. However, testing was constrained to developers’ local machines - all of which are Macs. This meant they weren’t actively including Windows PCs or their browsers in their development or QA processes.
With a worldwide and diverse community, they knew it is important to provide a smooth, stable and bug free experience for their users, no matter how these apps are accessed.
The Solution
Faced with a number of options, the team at Women Who Code turned to Sauce Labs. The Sauce Labs Continuous Testing Cloud provides more than 800 browser/operating system options. This gave developers on-demand availability for to spin up any browser they needed to test against, allowing for real-time debugging when issues are found during development or in production.
The Results
Since moving their testing to the Sauce Labs Continuous Testing Cloud, the team at Women Who Code has improved their development process, and enhanced quality of their applications and confidence in product rollout cadence—effectively removing quality as a bottleneck. They are also able to catch bugs faster and earlier in the development process.
“Sauce Labs completely changed the browser compatibility game for us,” said Megan Tiu, Director of Engineering at Women Who Code. “Previously, we were only able to test on browsers our developers had installed. Now, any of our engineers around the globe are able to spin up an Internet Explorer browser on a specific version of Windows, no matter their personal equipment at home.”
Now that developers have an easy-to-use tool at their disposal to do any kind of browser testing we might need, they’re blocked less in the development and QA phases,” added Megan. “They’re able to dedicate more time to the work they enjoy most and provides the most value to our community.”
Furthermore, an increased confidence in QA cycles has helped the team improve their delivery of new features. Their goal now is to move from a twice per week release schedule to full continuous delivery. “With Sauce Labs, we can be more confident that browser- and devicecompatibility issues will be surfaced earlier than they had been before,” said Megan. “This means we have fewer hold-ups as part of our deploys, which gives us peace of mind.”
